Featuring more than 120 photographers from over 20 countries, The New Woman Behind the Camera explores the diverse "new" women who embraced photography as a mode of professional and personal expression from the 1920s to the 1950s. The first exhibition to take an international approach to the subject, it examines how women brought their own perspectives to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography, and photojournalism, profoundly shaping the medium during a time of tremendous social and political change. Work by Lillian Bassman, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell, and Genevieve Naylor, among others, is included.

Lillian Bassman, a magazine art director and fashion photographer who achieved renown in the 1940s and ’50s with high-contrast, dreamy portraits of sylphlike models, then re-emerged in the ’90s as a fine-art photographer after a cache of lost negatives resurfaced, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. 

The first woman to break into the macho world of fashion photography is still working at 93. She talks about a lifetime behind the lens.

In the early 1970s Lillian Bassman, among the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century, made the decision to dispose of her

career.  Years later Ms. Bassman, who is 92, relented and retrieved her discarded images, seeking creative ways to reprint them.

Lillian Bassman, whose work originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar in the 1940's and 50's, was nearly all destroyed in the 70's, and found a new audience in the 90's from what remained.